College has just started and you want to get off on the right foot. You want to have all your belongings, organize your dorm, and get all of your textbooks. You would hope that the mailroom at Boston College would be prepared for all the packages many students are expecting at the start of this upcoming year. If you assumed as much, you— like many others—already discovered just the opposite. The mailroom is a complete and utter mess. Everything from the seemingly-endless line to the paucity of employees makes the otherwise-simple task of acquiring a package a very stressful situation.

According to the staff at the mailroom, they have tried to find more efficient ways of sorting packages to make the whole process easier both for them and students at BC. One of the techniques they put into effect is sending e-mails to students informing them that their package has been received, processed, and ready to pick up. What the employee at the mailing room did not tell me is how ridiculously long it takes the mailroom to process the package. Students and their parents are paying hard-earned money for a package to be delivered by a specific date only for it to be held captive by the employees in the mailroom. I get that there are many packages arriving all at once but what else did the mailroom expect at the beginning of the year? Call me pragmatic, but if they are understaffed then they should hire more employees. I know for a fact that all the work-study jobs where filled and some students eager to work did not get a job assigned.

In addition to the egregious amount of time the mailroom employees take to “process” a package, you have to print the e-mail in order to receive your package, no excuses! What ever happened to “Going Green”? Most students at BC have a cell phone that can receive e-mails, so it is difficult to understand why the mailroom requires us to bring e-mail on paper. Moreover, students at BC also have a limited allotment of print-outs they are allowed per semester. It is inconsiderate for the mailroom to expect us to waste a print-out on something as useless as the mailroom e-mail. How does the e-mail somehow facilitate the mailroom employees’ job of locating a package anyway? The entire e-mail idea seems like a perfectly good idea but once put into practice is faulty, to say the least. One key method the mailing room has instituted to alleviate what has become a hassle is extending the mail service hours. Many students received an e-mail this Friday titled “EXTEDED MAIL SERVICE HOURS” informing them that the typical hours (Monday through Thursday from 8:00am to 4:15pm, Friday 8:00am to 3:35pm, and Saturday from 8:00am to 4:15pm) were “extended.” I don’t know what impression they were trying to give but the reality of the extended hours is that Saturday hours are shortened 45 minutes and, in turn, the mailing room will be open for four and a half hours. The e-mail also encourages students to arrive early since “the earlier you arrive, the shorter the lines should be,” which suggests that the employees are aware of the inefficiency in their department.

Something needs to be done to speed up the time it takes for one to receive a package. Hiring more employees—among many other things—would definitely be a step in the right direction. Another good idea would be assigning times for students to pick up their respective packages, which would distribute the congestion. A designated time would aid both the students and the staff; the students wouldn’t have to wait in ridiculously long lines and the staff would know which packages to have on hand at certain time slots. It is ludicrous that most of the time the line stretches as far back as the Eagle’s Nest!